Today, I celebrated my second sacrament (communion) in a progressive church, and during the service, I found more answers to questions I have posed in a previous rant about life in a progressive context. A week ago, I wondered (slightly tongue-in-cheek) whether I might attract dirty looks if I suddenly burst out in strains of Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah. Guess what the final hymn of the morning was? I rubbed my eyes in disbelief as I read to the end of the order of service. Evidently, nobody really minds if you have a hankering for the old forms. And this, in turn, answered another concern: that there could arise a subculture of political correctness that would prevent certain words from ever arising. Jehovah? No problem. Resurrection? Fine.The communion liturgy (and, later, the final hymn) was presented in a way that side-stepped my concern about political correctness. The meditation introduced the communion by considering the meaning attached to the symbols. The minister offered three stories which illustrated collisions of one sort or another between established understandings of communion (e.g. that the words of institution are like a magic incantation without which the celebration is ineffectual) and understandings that have arisen within the postmodern context. She then went on to offer an alternative approach to the communion table, and for this, she drew upon an idea of encouragement, pointing to the fact that the word “encouragement” is cognate with the french word “coeur” meaning heart. Communion is a time when we gather in community to “hearten” one another.
In effect, the minister said: “Keep your forms and your traditional practices; simply change the way you think about them.”
This is precisely the procedure Jesus followed when, again and again, he pointed out that the formalism of Jewish laws and customs was pointless if not accompanied by a faithfulness of heart. With alarming frequency, he accused his detractors of hypocrisy, precisely because they demonstrated a failure to align their interior life, their spirituality (their interpretation!) with their outward claims of holiness.
However, this trick—the maneuver of shifting one’s interpretation while retaining outward forms—gives occasion for critics to level a serious charge, the most serious charge of all, and one which must be met by those who identify as progressive. The charge is more familiar in the context of challenging Derrida’s deconstructive practices: that all Derrida’s positive claims are undermined by the very practices he applies to those whose views he himself has previously undermined, like a snake eating its own tail. It is not good enough to say: “it’s all a matter of interpretation.” Not in a church. If unmediated interpretation is the best we can ever do, then we can simply close the doors and all go home.
What are some of the possible answers that prevent a downward spiral into skepticism from Descartes to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Derrida, on and on? (While avoiding the usual cynicism that says things like: we go to church for reasons which are wholly self-serving, to pick up women, for business contacts, for political advancement, etc.)
1. I would begin by stating, plainly, that the mere fact of my presence in church indicates a willingness to defer conversation about the grounding of my beliefs. Yes, belief must have a foothold in the rational. But at the same time, I can assert the existence of an immanent spirituality in my life without feeling compelled to prove it. Sometimes, we spend too much time worrying about making our faith relevant to the world at large. It is always fruitful to demonstrate to the world the simple fact that faith speaks to issues central to life in today’s world. But relevance is not the same thing as a demand for proof. In the practice of my faith, there are threshold claims, and it is enough merely to state them.
2. A progressive practice might more successfully assert itself with a focus upon method rather than upon content—promoting an environment which fosters faith formation without insisting upon the final form of such formation. To some degree, all legitimate religions do this; that is why we call them religions instead of cults. However, some practices within both liberal and conservative traditions are more prescriptive in their content (e.g. catechesis), while other practices are more facilitative, sometimes reserving the prescriptive for their procedures (e.g. spiritual direction). The obvious textualism of catechesis makes it more vulnerable to the critical scrutiny of those techniques (such as deconstruction) against which progressives must steel themselves.
There is a practical reason why such a vulnerability emerges for a progressive congregation as it freshly declares itself. This is, after all, an outing, and so the insights of queer theory into matters of identity are germane. (The critical method of “queering” is just deconstruction dressed in rainbow-coloured clothes.) The congregation is adopting a new identity. It is conceptualizing itself as an “other” in relation to the dominant viewpoint from which it has detached itself, like the gay son sitting down at the dinner table with his straight parents to explain things. All of us, whether as individuals or as organizations, must lay claim to an identity if we are to survive. But identity cannot exist as an abstraction; it must be defined and it must be declared in palpable terms. It is an easy matter for Great Britain, with a 700 year history of constitutionalism, to reject criticism from the U.S.A. that it does not have a written constitution; 700 years have given Great Britain a firm sense of its identity in relation to the rest of the world. But it is far more difficult for a congregation, one year into a newly adopted sense of itself, to resist the need (like refusing to eat) to write precisely worded accounts of itself, to tell to itself the story of itself. It builds its sense of identity by creating new liturgy, composing new hymns, framing new prayers and, as with today’s meditation before the celebration of communion, making explicit the fresh interpretation to be undertaken. To be fair, in spite of an unwritten constitution, Great Britain is notorious for the stories it tells of itself, all those things that are reflected in what the world has come to know as its pomp and circumstance, for everyone and every institution, whether freshly outed or long-established, tells an account of itself in service of its boundless need to affirm its identity.
Perhaps we cannot help but expose ourselves to the charge that we succumb to our own critical method. Better to be fully aware of it than to proceed oblivious of all that is at stake.